Diamond Life as the new baseball season approaches

As the new baseball season begins, with hope springing eternal for teams and their fans, I’m reminded of a high school coach I had the privilege of playing for many years ago. Angelo Plaia made it his life’s goal to teach the skills and strategies of the game, but thought it even more important to convey the higher purposes of baseball, which are there to be appreciated if only one looks beyond the scores and the stats.

We were ninth-graders playing for the Oceanside JV, and we practiced and played our home games on a rocky, uneven, threadbare field near Oceanside Park, where the frigid winds snapped routinely off the nearby bay and hardened our skin every early spring. We were playing baseball, but wore enough layers to be playing football in December, truly because we loved the game.

We certainly didn’t do it to meet girls, who had better things to do than chill their bones on the icy aluminum stands. On the field, if you didn’t connect solidly with a pitched ball, your hands stung for hours. One breezy, cold afternoon, though, we all laid the bats and gloves down, and were treated to a lesson that we hadn’t seen coming.

It began when Coach Plaia called us as a team over to first base. He was a bear of a man, built like a barrel and about as strong. It seemed that he and Babe Ruth had similar nutritional philosophies. We’d already been issued our uniform numbers — a big day for any ballplayer — and our Plaia-issued nicknames, which he scrawled under the bills of our dark blue wool caps, all with the white sewn-on capital “O.” Mine was “Billy C,” because I played outfield and reminded him of Billy Conigliaro, one of the famous brothers who played for the Red Sox. So we weren’t quite sure what this was all about, and why it was so important that we had to forgo batting and fielding practice. Coach kneeled at the first base bag and called us all into a huddle, as he began to speak in a low growl.

“This, gentlemen, is first base. There are many ways to get here: a hit, a walk, get hit by a pitch, any number of ways — yet it’s amazing how many people never even get this far.” It began to dawn on us that this was not going to be about baseball, but something else. Something bigger.